BEACH HOUSE: DEPRESSION CHERRY (2015)
1) Levitation; 2) Sparks; 3)
Space Song; 4) Beyond Love; 5) 10:37; 6) PPP; 7) Wildflower; 8) Bluebird; 9)
Days Of Candy.
You know, despite the fact that the sound of
Beach House has evolved over the
years — arguably reaching a «grandeur peak» with Teen Dream and mostly staying there with Bloom — frankly speaking, it's not that much of an evolution. Everywhere you look, you still find
largely the same formula of misty-moisty dream-pop with chiming keyboards and
floating guitars and Galadriel vocals. Therefore, to read that "this
record shows a return to simplicity" in their press release is, to say the
least, dismaying; and to read, just a few lines later, that "here, we continue
to let ourselves evolve while fully ignoring the commercial context in which
we exist" is downright terrifying. Not to mention that, you know, they
are actually selling this record —
they cannot "fully" ignore the commercial context in which they exist
unless they feed on wild fruits of the jungle and drink water from pure,
untainted mountain streams. An impression that their music might convey, for that matter, but then don't they, like, need to
at least pay for studio time?..
Anyway, Depression
Cherry — a rather awful title, if I may so suggest — is indeed a conscious
return to the rather subdued, minimalist textures of the band's first two
albums, where they did not use real drums or, indeed, much of anything beyond
ancient-sounding keyboards, guitars, and the pssht-pssht drum machine. The
question is — why? «Evolving» with
this working pattern is pretty much out of the question, as the music has
almost exactly the same moods, tones, tempos, associations as it «used to be».
Fine, so we have already established them to be the AC/DC of dream-pop, but
even AC/DC could get dull after a while, unless the Young brothers sat down and
crapped out a particularly fine batch of new (if still derivative) riffs. What
about these guys? Bloom could still
grow on you with time. Do these songs
still have any fresh signs of magic, slowly, but steadily working on your
brain?
A few, I'd say. Speaking of riffage, the main
riff of ʽSpace Songʼ weaves a beautiful pattern indeed, although I couldn't
say the same about the bubbly space-synth countermelody that dominates the
bridge section — they should have rather allowed the guitar to build upon that
riff. ʽBeyond Loveʼ also has a great guitar tone — colorful, sustained,
slightly distorted, perfectly attenuating Victoria's vocals. And the two
extended tracks, ʽPPPʼ, and ʽDays Of Candyʼ, have those trademark hypnotizing
Beach House codas — ʽPPPʼ turns into a fairyland waltz that manages to be
completely sentimental and totally non-corny at the same time, and the wailing
lead guitar line of ʽDays Of Candyʼ is a simple-graceful-magical way to finish
the album, but... but...
...ultimately, it's unsatisfactory. All of this
is just way, way, way too safe, cozy,
comfortable, predictable, expectable. All the tricks of the trade have been
learned, studied, reproduced, all the techniques explained and chewed over,
including the technique of always playing the same chord at least twice or
thrice before turning it over to the next one — otherwise, you know, you can
create the sense of «rushed», or, even worse, entrap Beach House in the boring
layman conventions of that stupid old fourth dimension called «time». And
timelessness is the essence of the Beach House sound — woe to him who suddenly
gets the impulse to ask, "oh wait, haven't I already heard this song before?" Before? What before? There
is no before, or after. There's just "a place I want to take you / When
the unknown will surround you" (ʽLevitationʼ). Wait! you cry, I frickin' know this place already, I've been in
that place since 2006! No, no, they say, that won't do. In the world of Beach
House, there is no 2006, or 2015.
"There is no right time", she sings, "you will grow too quick,
then you will get over it".
Coming back to our senses (briefly), I should
conclude that Depression Cherry has its
moments, but that its ideology of «getting back to basics» is flawed to the
core, because (a) this band had never moved too far away from its basics in the
first place, (b) this band had already explored its basics so thoroughly that deliberately
returning there almost feels like an auto-lobotomy, and (c) who do they think
they are — the Beatles on the friggin' rooftop? No thumbs up, thank you very
much, though I do single out ʽSpace Songʼ here as particularly luvvable.
Apparently, all of their space is
dressed in red velvet, and each asteroid is inhabited by its own native siren.
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